Harassed and in desperation at being pressed on to a miserable marriage destitute of all that could justify it, Isabella, after one of those long and fruitless discussions with her mother, once addressed a letter to our Queen Victoria; but in a pure Court like that of England little idea could be formed of the stagnant atmosphere of the Spanish palace from which the poor young Queen sent forth her plaint. Beyond the Court raged the stormy discontent of the country, which had been thwarted for more than thirty years of the fulfilment of its constitutional rights promised by Ferdinand VII. as the condition of his return to the throne of Spain. Whilst Queen Victoria was daily increasing in the knowledge of constitutional rights which are the base of a Sovereign’s power, poor Isabella’s Prime Ministers resigned at any moment in pique or jealousy of some other politician, and the people grew daily more discontented at finding the Parliament was a farce, and it meant neither the progress of the land nor the protection of the people. Bulwer Lytton was constantly sending despatches to England about the shortcomings of Isabella II. as a woman, but he seemed to lay no stress on the cause of her failure as a Queen. Under proper conditions Isabella doubtless would have been a good woman and a great Queen, but choked with the weeds of intrigue she was lost. Undisciplined and uneducated, the poor Queen fell a victim to what, if properly directed, would have been virtues instead of vices. The marriage to which Isabella was forced by intrigue was, of course, the greatest evil which could have befallen such an impulsive, warm-hearted girl, who knew no more how to turn a deaf ear to a claimant for her favour than to keep her purse shut to the plea of an unfortunate beggar. The Right Hon. Henry Lytton Bulwer wrote a little later from the British Embassy at Madrid to the Court of St. James’s, saying that he “looked at the Queen’s conduct as the moral result of the alliance she had been more or less compelled to contract, and he regarded her rather with interest and pity than blame or reproach.” Isabel’s natural intuition of our Queen Victoria’s good heart prompted her letters to her. They were sent by a private hand, and who knows what evils might have been prevented in the Court of Spain if the long journey, so formidable in those days, had not placed the sister-Queens so far apart? Espartero’s plea for Isabel to marry Don Enrique de Assisi, the man of her heart, met no support in a Court torn with intrigue, and the sad, bad story of Isabel doubtless had its source in the tragedy of an unhappy marriage. At the plea of a persistent wooer, who knew that the Queen had the right of dissolving a Ministry, a Government would fall; and as the station of her favourites became lower and lower, as time went on the ill-regulated Sovereign had a Government as undependable as her friends.